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Cooper Kaminsky played “Shrek” in the recent production of “Shrek the Musical” at the PACE Center in Parker, Colo. at the sight of him. He is judged before he speaks, feared before he acts, and treated as something that must be removed rather than understood. He self-deports from the play’s kingdom of Duloc to a swamp, where he is safe from judgment, but lives in isolation. The sorting, purifying, and banishing from Duloc by the villain Lord Farquaad runs through the production as Farquaad plots to become king through lies and deceit. Fairy-tale characters are rounded up by his militaristic guards, and the character Pinocchio jokes that Farquaad’s agents are sending the “freaks” away, dumped into Shrek’s swamp after being declared undesirable. Lord Farquaad tells the freaks, “You and the rest of that fairy-tale trash are ruining my kingdom.” The villain later sings, “Once upon a time, this place was infested. Freaks on every corner, I had them all arrested.” McAllister said the musical resonates in today’s political climate. Those who fail inspection are removed. Order is enforced through spectacle, humiliation, and violence, including a gingerbread man tortured for information, all played for laughs, but never without consequence. Jacob Frye, who played the Big Bad Wolf and other who voted to build the PACE Center not long after the 2008 recession. Even then, bringing arts and culture to Douglas County, a conservative stronghold, was deeply contested. Later, as mayor, he performed for the first time on the stage at the PACE Center in “West Side Story.” His dual work, bringing the PACE Center to Parker and performing on its stage, gives Waid what he described as “some historical perspective on the facility itself, and what it actually means to the creation of art.” From the beginning, the PACE Center represented a philosophical divide. “There are some folks who just don’t think governments should be in the arts and culture business,” Waid said. “There’s those who think that arts and culture represent an intrinsic value to a community. I’m one of those that believes that way.” The value of the PACE Center was also economic, bringing people into town where “they eat at restaurants, they fill up with gas, they buy stuff at stores, and provide sales tax revenue,” he said. The facility, Waid said, has done exactly what we hoped it would, becoming “a catalyst for not only community arts and creative development, but also for economic development and impact in our community.” The PACE Center was always intended to offer the community multiple entry points to the arts. “When we built PACE, we insisted it could not be a singleuse facility. It could not be just a theater. It could not be just a venue,” Waid said. The goal was flexibility and access, a space capable of hosting four or five events at the same time. Today, the PACE Center includes a 500-seat theater, classrooms, studios, and event spaces that host everything from professional theater and art classes to funerals and celebrations of life to weddings, to award ceremonies, and everything in between. “If we were going to invest the money of our taxpayers,” Waid said, “we needed it to be a true community hub for everyone in the community. And that’s what we created.” Waid identifies as a Republican, a detail that complicates easy narratives around the controversy sparked by Pride flags. “In all honesty, I personally did not see the flag as an issue at all,” he said. “It’s a creative expression. The creative license of having the Pride flags, which were out for all of maybe three minutes in a three-hour performance, is just a way of including everyone.” Waid said the story’s theme of inclusion is unambiguous from beginning to end and hits hard for any member of the audience, child or adult. He pointed out that the message isn’t limited to those who identify as LGBTQ+ but to all community members. “It’s such a beautiful story, and it’s such a beautiful play that hits on so many levels,” Waid said. For Waid, Shrek’s message of inclusion is what makes life interesting and worth living. “Life would be so freaking boring if everyone was a big, fat bearded guy like me,” he said. “What makes us all so incredible is our uniqueness. It’s beautiful that there’s so many versions and varieties of humans out there. We just need to make space and welcome one another.” That belief extends beyond the stage. Empathy, he said, doesn’t require agreement, but it does require making space for each other, trying to understand each other, and accepting each other. “It doesn’t mean I have to destroy them because they like something I don’t. We just need to accept each other and invite everyone to the table,” he said. Waid argues for relationship over rigid adherence to ideology. “It takes as much material and effort to build a bridge as it does to build a wall,” he said. “But the difference is when you build a bridge, you can meet the other person, and you can talk face to face.” He framed empathy as a matter of effort in caring for one another over dogma. “When you use all of that time and energy and resources and materials to build a wall, you never have the luxury of seeing that person face-to-face or eye-to-eye,” Waid said. “All you’re doing is banging up against that wall.” He hopes that the conflict around the Pride flag doesn’t prevent PACE and the Town of Parker from working with Sasquatch Productions and McAllister in the future. “Sasquatch does amazing, professional performances. They’re a great group of dedicated people,” Waid said. “I hope, beyond any complaints in the short-term, that Sasquatch is still invited to participate with the PACE Center.” WHY “SHREK” LANDS DIFFERENTLY RIGHT NOW “Shrek” explores who is welcome in the community, who is not, and who gets to decide. The show begins with an ogre being told, explicitly and repeatedly, that the world is “not for you.” When Shrek ventures out of isolation, a woman screams characters in the musical, said the dispute over a Pride flag and the erasure of queer identity from public spaces was never abstract. Frye identifies as queer and said that he grew up learning that he was not accepted within what labels as “normal.” This was difficult for him, but he found acceptance in theater, a space for outsiders and the LGBTQ+ community. Frye was in high school when he first met McAllister, who was teaching at Stage Door Theater about 10 years ago. The Pride flag, he said, represents far more than identity. It signals safety, shared understanding, and the presence of people who recognize one another’s lived experiences. He sees acceptance not as a default condition, but as something that must often be defended and reaffirmed. All of those themes are also explored in “Shrek the Musical.” Frye described growing up surrounded by images of heterosexual, cisgender life presented as universal, not maliciously, but relentlessly. It was a message that he feels communicates to LGBTQ+ youth that they are different, outside the norm, and to a degree, unwelcome. “Seeing [the Pride flag] in a major theater production would have helped me realize when I was younger that there are more queer people than I thought there were, that I wasn’t alone,” Frye said. “It would have sparked an investigation into what that meant and helped me identify parts of myself earlier.” That is why representation cannot be treated as a matter of politeness or tolerance alone. Queer visibility, Frye said, carries emotional and psychological weight because it counters years of being told, implicitly or explicitly, to be quieter, smaller, or grateful for conditional inclusion. “We didn’t want to be quiet,” Frye said. “It was more important to be loud in the face of that bigotry than to cede to their demands.” To Broas, one of the final lines in “Freak Flag” carries the message the cast fought to keep visible. Pinocchio’s line, “I’m wood. I’m good. Get used to it,” lands as a declaration, one that echoes decades of Pride protests and public insistence on being seen. For Broas, the line does not demand agreement, only recognition. “Inclusion of all people does not mean exclusion of you if you’re different,” she said. That insistence, she added, is not a modern insertion but something already embedded in the script. “Harvey Milk said, not just Milk but many in the queer community in the 70s, said, ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.’ It is in the script. It is obvious to me,” she said. DENVER VOICE MARCH 2026 11 society

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